


This thy Golden Time

by Ladycat



Series: Shadow'verse [18]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Episode: s05e22 The Gift, Found Families, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:42:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because they were older and more circumspect about it didn’t mean they were all happy and healthy and dealing with the new patterns of their lives. It just meant they were better liars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This thy Golden Time

After so many weeks, Xander wasn’t ashamed of coming home smelled of sweat and sawdust. Mostly not, anyway, and he pretended that he wasn’t watching for a nose cutely wrinkled in disappointment or a gag hastily covered up.

They pretended they weren’t laughing at him, so it all worked out. Mostly.

“Watcha working on?” Deciding to take the furthest end of the sofa as a compromise, Xander wasn’t surprised to immediately get a lapful of Dawn-feet. It was the kind of thing Dawn did: personal space long ago losing any meaning except when _they_ were encroaching on _hers_.

Eyes narrowed in concentration, Dawn carefully sketched a line of something—grey, maybe charcoal?—on the paper balance on her knees. “Drawing.” The _duh_ was only half-hearted at best.

“Oh, yeah? Drawing what?” Scintillating conversation! Wicked, erudite wit! All part of the Xander Harris stink-o-rama package! He wasn’t quite far gone enough to smirk at his own mental quips—that’s what biology had been for—but it took work to smother the smile. He busied himself with wiping his hands on his jeans to make sure they were at least _dry_ and dirty before picking up one delicate, sock-covered foot. “You have little feet.”

“I do not! They’re actually kind of big, for a girl’s.” She didn’t look up from her work, continuing to move with slow, exacting precision. Or at least, that was what it looked like, outside in. “I’m a size eight and a half already.”

Was that big for a girl? Xander didn’t mention his own size 13 clown-feet, instead looking at the curve of his thumb against the arch of her foot. Her socks were white and going threadbare at the ball, but it still looked like a child’s foot against his hand—pale and doll-like. Fragile. “They don’t look big.”

That earned him a flash of smile, almost hesitant for such a normally breezy, attention-hungry girl. Huh. Whatever she was working on must be really important, then. “I can’t fit into any of Willow’s shoes at all, and only some of Tara’s. She’s a size eight.”

“And, what, Wills has the tiniest feet of them all?”

A tiny, momentary shadow had Xander mentally whacking his head against a wall. He actually _knew_ the answer to that, because he’d spent most of high school enduring Buffy’s attempts at gender neutral slumber parties, that were never gender neutral, and Xander didn’t hate them nearly as much as she thought he was supposed to. He liked braiding hair—that wasn’t a _crime_. Nor did it lead to certain unfortunate assumptions. He just liked how silky it was, falling through his fingers like a sun-dazzled waterfall.

“Hey.” Dawn used the foot he held to nudge him, making him look up. Her smile trembled on the edges, but it was real. Big and brave, that was his Dawny, for all she never thought so. “She called me Big Foot, sometimes. She said I stomped too loudly, and that’s why my feet were so big. Mostly, I think she just hated that it meant I was going to be taller than her. She never let me buy heels.”

“I think someone else had a little more control over that,” Xander said, resuming his foot rub. The sock was cotton and very soft. He could feel her bones. “Like, oh, the one who wielded the credit card?”

She giggled. She actually _giggled_ , eyes dancing as she scrunched down more tightly into her corner of the sofa. That was... a sound Xander hadn’t heard a lot of, brave little toaster or not. “Mom didn’t care. She thought it was funny, because—because she would pout and make _sure_ she wasn’t throwing a temper-tantrum, even though it kind of really was.”

The inability to use names instead of pronouns wasn’t new. It bothered Xander, smoothing his fingers down the curve of her heel, but Tara said that it was something a lot of people did when grieving. Like it was okay for it to be ‘mom’ or ‘her’ or ‘my sister’, but the moment it was _Joyce_ or _Buffy_ , it became too real all over again. She even found articles all about how powerful the naming of things could be, but that just started Willow and Spike on another of their endless Magic–Relevant or Not? arguments.

He hadn’t really needed the academic evidence, anyway. Just because it bothered him didn’t mean there was something wrong with it. It just bothered him.

“How was work today?” There was always a moment of awkwardness after stories about their lost ones were told. A sense of _oh god, now what do I talk about?_ It made the adults look like they were sucking lemons and determinedly enjoying it; Dawn just sounded formal and very, very young.

“What, the manly odor of employment wasn’t a give away?” He grinned, cheeky and encouraging, at her. It didn’t get him another giggle, but she turned back to her drawing with a smile that was genuinely amused. Score. “I could lean over,” he said, doing so gently, “make sure you get a nice big wh—”

“Xander!” She was laughing too much to actually sound as indignant as she wanted, but there was real annoyance in the twist of her mouth as she tilted her drawing away from him, holding it protectively. “You’ll mess it up!”

“Yeah?” He didn’t move. She was way, way too bony to be actually comfortable, and she actually had those hip-things the rest of his ladies—barring Tara, something he _never_ wanted more than visual confirmation for—had been too thin for, the curve of it was digging into his solar plexus. He could feel her heart-beat, though, the rush of oxygen and blood racing through her veins, all shouting _I’m here, I’m alive, I’m with you_.

Just because they were older and more circumspect about it didn’t mean they were all happy and healthy and dealing with the new patterns of their lives. It just meant they were better liars.

Dawn harrumphed, glaring, but didn’t try to wiggle loose. “Freak. And no, I’m not telling you what it is.”

“Uh huh. Like you wouldn’t tell me where you hid the last chocolate bar?”

Her scowl was a fierce, ferocious looking thing, complete with a stubbornness even Giles was starting to respect. _Reluctantly_ respect, and hating every second of it, but still—respecting. Xander blinked up into it, adopting his most kicked-puppy expression, the one that even Willow still fell for, going so far as to whine just a tiny, tiny bit.

“Freak,” she said again, but this time she was looking pleased. And swayed.

He was _so_ the master of the pout. Even Spike had to bow to his superiority there.

“Well?” he asked. He didn’t try to crane his head forward, instead studying the hard edge of the tablet, the rings that held it together on top. He remembered that one, already more than half used. Spike had bought it for her, gruffly ordering Xander to pick it up their last shopping run, even handing extra money, like Xander wasn’t well aware that funds were split pretty evenly between all three men.

It was always a little odd to him that the sister of the Slayer, embodiment of all things empoweringly female, and daughter to one of the kindest, most competent women Xander had ever met, was being taken care of the traditional way, ie, by the menfolk.

Not that Willow and Tara didn’t help because they _did_. A lot. Really help, not just Xander mentally fearing for his gonads because Willow was scary with her newly-discovered telepathy—they really did do the things Xander and his manly cohorts couldn’t, since _they_ were still in school and couldn’t do the provider thing.

It was just odd that their completely non-traditional group had fallen into such traditional roles.

“Did—did she ever tell you how she found me? After?”

The problem with only using pronouns was occasionally Xander had _no_ idea which she and which when Dawn was talking about. But _after_ implied the funeral, so _she_ had to be Buffy. “At school?” he hazarded.

“Yeah.” Dawn carefully placed the tablet picture-faced down against the sofa, tilted so the picture didn’t come into contact with anything. Then she snuggled back underneath Xander, not caring that he was still stinky and probably really dirty.

Xander didn’t say anything. It was usually Spike who got the kitten treatment and he wasn’t going to ruin it, now that it was his turn.

“I was in art class. We were doing negative space. You know, drawing the space around an object instead of the object itself? The shadows.”

Right. Xander dropped his head onto her shoulder, hating his life. Their lives. A girl like Dawn shouldn’t be exposed to this much irony so early. It’d stunt her growth, probably. Encourage her to hang out with goths. Maybe even—were there Sylvia Plath poems in her room? Because if so, Xander was throwing all of them _right_ out. “Was it fun?”

Oh yes. So suave. He was _so_ suave. Where was Spike again? Much as it pained him to admit it, Spike was way better at this kind of thing. He knew all the right things to say, stealing all the words before Xander could ever find them and put them awkwardly together.

This time her laughter was more familiar: a deep, low chuckle that’d be sexy if she were older and not _Dawn_ , with a watery-quaver that never truly went away. “Sort of. I never really liked art in school—too messy. But, um.” Her breathing was slow and steady, a soft _whoosh_ that roared reassuringly in Xander’s ear. “Pam thought that maybe I’d like to try it again. Not negative space stuff. Just... sketching.”

Because _drawing_ was for babies. Xander didn’t say that, though, looping an arm around her waist and pulling her more tightly against him. It’d been a long day on site, and he’d been required to be more Supervisor than Carpenter, something that never sat well with him. “About anything in particular?”

“Pam had some suggestions, yeah.” _Pam_ was the not-therapist that Giles had arranged for Dawn to see. She didn’t know all the details and Dawn had a list of things she wasn’t supposed to talk about, if at all possible. Willow thought Pam was a crack, which was odd since she was normally into that holistic stuff. Xander wasn’t sure if Pam was anything at all, but some weeks it was the _only_ thing Dawn got out of the house for. “But I’m not doing those. They were dumb.”

“May I see?” May, not can, and wouldn’t Willow be proud? Not that he’d done it just to appease the Grammar Nazi that lived within. He did it because he wanted Dawn to know she had a choice. A _real_ choice. He wanted to see it, sure, but only if she wanted to let him.

“Um. Later? I’m kind of doing things, um. For you guys.”

Ah. Xander had no idea what that meant, but the way Dawn was squirming, finding it very difficult to not look at him from the corner of her eye—those were all things Xander had learned to recognize as leading to a path he really didn’t want to go down. Sometimes it went to good, if painful places, where they talked about things they didn’t want to but really needed to talk about. Most of the time, though, it went to places that had tears and hysterics and frantic calls to Spike or Tara to come fix what he’d broken.

“Okay.” Tucking his face against her neck, Xander blew out a breath. She made a wavery, whining noise but didn’t try to wriggle free. “So, is it one for each of us? Can I see someone else’s?”

He played it for laughs, the big, over-eager puppy that was as effective as the whipped and kicked kind. But Dawn didn’t laugh, staying quiet and thoughtful and hidden, since all Xander could see was the fine patterns on the skin of neck.

“No,” she said eventually. “Um. That’s okay, right?”

Xander patted her belly, trying hard not to notice, as he always noticed, how _big_ his hands were against her. She was so damned tiny. “Dork,” he said fondly, grinning when she made her _I want to kick you, dammit_ noise. “Of course that’s okay. Do I get to see at least _mine_ later? When it’s done?”

“Yeah. And you can all show each other, if you want, afterwards, but I really just want to _do_ this. Pam said it’s more important that I do it, then me actually giving it, and most of the time I think she’s as stupid as Spike says she is, but I think she’s right, this time, so I really just—”

“Hey.” Digging around until he felt sofa, not girl, Xander levered himself up onto his hands. “We had a talk about you stealing my signature moves, you know. Babbling? Mine. Not sharing it, either. Okay, maybe with Willow, but she has a _different_ kind of babbling, so you, Missy, can just stuff it.”

She gave him a wicked looking smirk, but accepted the conversation change with grace. Switching the smirk into something exaggerated and disgusted, she waved her hand in front of her nose. “You’re _stinky_. Go shower!.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it, especially when he intentionally dropped all his weight onto Dawn, wrapping around her while she shrieked and tried to get away and worried about her sketch book and hitting her head on the edge of the sofa, and smiled so brilliantly, sun-gold and glowing, that it let both of them forget just enough. It didn’t matter that it only lasted a few minutes, Dawn going so far as to shove him up the stairs to the shower, hands on his back, trying hard not to laugh as she pushed him around, Xander careful not to lean all his weight against her, just enough that she had to _work_ for it.

A few minutes were plenty.


End file.
